2rd Street Art Festival Patras │ ArtWalk 2

Graffiti in recent years has become an integral part of the entertainment industry. It is often… trendy, fashionable, commercial and mainstream. It walked its way from the roads to the galleries and to the interest of major exhibition curators and major art collectors, yet used as an aesthetic by various companies in their advertising campaigns and as a magnet by the institutions for programs relating to young people.
On top of this, graffiti is a free way of artistic thinking and expression, a spontaneous collaborative act, an ephemeral piece of art whose maker already knows that it could last just a few hours to several years. The charm is its own ravages. The aesthetic quality issues, the developmental logic of urban centers and the commercial use of the graffiti are issues that confront its nature.
The brief history of graffiti of the past five decades has shown that state property is a mean of expression and criticism of the imperative urban scenery.
Because graffiti is done collectively by the time it’s confronted with every passerby’s eyes. The establishment of cooperative relations between citizens as well as the public debate that is caused by a mural is an integral part of the process.
Graffiti also plays, in the smartest way possible with the finite assessment of what is aesthetically right and wrong… a question specifically canceled by Fountain, the urinal of Duchamp, at 1917.

Graffiti doesn’t need either committees or a buyer to gain value and doesn’t need endless texts to illustrate. Thus it humorously plays with the judgment of both the art world and the museums.
Moreover, the birth of graffiti found itself in the late 1960s in New York, where the indicators of unemployment and poverty were soaring and some teenagers instinctively created their own communication code. Within this initiative solidarity, competition and relations of cooperation were built. The symbolic act of graffiti, as an act of freedom, highlights therefore in the most serious and meaningful way the crisis we are experiencing in Greece and expresses daily the anxieties, the fears and the dreams of people. It questions freely and endlessly.

Thematic 1Street notebooks. The slogans and graffiti of Exarchia
May 13th – June 13th 2016
Archaeological Museum of Patras
The exhibition “Street notebooks. The slogans and graffiti of Exarchia” curated by Sofia Eliza Bouratsis and with photographs by Takis Spiropoulos, a work of the Luxembourg artist Serge Ecker who was inspired by the Greek aesthetic of our crisis and a selection of video documentaries about graffiti in Greece by Giorgos Gkounezos launched on the 13th of May.

Inspired by the dynamic of graffiti and the works that were discovered in recent years on the walls of our cities, we are preparing in the city of Patras the Graffiti Art in May – June 2016.

Citizens provide their walls, Art in Progress organizes the scaffolding and provides colors and the graffiti artists, the writers, the street artists and the crews are invited to come to write, to spray, to smudge, to draw and freely fill the city with questions, images, thoughts and challenges.

ProjectsThe graffiti artists will start their work on May 27 and it will be due to June 5.

ConversationsDuring the two weekends (27-29 May and 3-5 June) there will be open discussions for all (the place, time and speakers are to be announced soon). Although experts will participate in these discussions we will follow the concept of an open forum so that everyone can speak. Whoever wants to participate can announce themselves before the conversation or can spontaneously take part in it!

WorkshopsAt the same time there will be workshops where artists will share with the audience their techniques.
Graffiti Art is organized in the framework of ArtWalk 2 by Art in Progress.

Art in Progress in collaboration with ΣΑΝΑ, in the framework of the international 2nd Street Art Festival Patras │ ArtWalk 2, invite students studying Architecture and Fine Arts across the country to participate in the workshop “r2, architecture meets art” on the design and implementation of construction as interventions in urban scenery. In this workshop we will specifically explore the relationship between architecture and visual arts within the constantly changing urban environment. The participants in collaboration with teachers, theorists and artists will negotiate the sense of surprise, as it emerges in the limits of the city experience. Basic theoretical and conceptual tool will be the scale and its overturn.

Speakers:
Thanasis Moutsopoulos, Department of Architecture, University of Crete
Nikos Patsavos, Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina
Panos Charalambous, Athens School of Fine Arts
Panagiotis Pangalos, Athens School of Fine Arts
Giannis Ziogas, Fine Arts, University of Western Macedonia
Konstantinos Vasileiou, Athens School of Fine Arts
Vasilis Stroumbakis, Department of Architecture, University of Patras
Dimitris Frangos, Department of Architecture, AUTH
Dimitris Zouroudis, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, AUTH
Lois Papadopoulos, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly
Apostolos Panos, Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina
Angelos Papageorgiou, Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina
Iosif Dakoronias, Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina
Angelos Papageorgiou, Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina
Iakovos Rigos, Department of Architecture, University of Crete
Dimitris Rotsios, Architect
Vasilis Tsesmetzis, Ctrl_Space Lab

Students will work in groups and give them materials and tools for implementing their ideas and on-site construction.
The structures will be created out of the city throughout the course of international Street art Festival Patras | ArtWalk 2 (13.05 – 13.06.2016).
After completion of the workshop will be given certificate of participation.

We also inform you that ArtWalk 2 was a non-profit making festival and it was clearly based on the voluntary efforts of active citizens.